We’re taking down our Christmas tree this evening.
Usually we do this closer to Epiphany (January 6th), but on Saturday I had a party, and on Sunday after church we melted into our beds and easy chairs and napped the afternoon away, sunny though it was. On Monday it rained, which turned into snow on Tuesday … so here we are, January 10th, beginning to put the Christmas things away for another 11 months. I have to say that I’ve enjoyed this slow transition, these hints of festivity carried over into Epiphanytide. If we were residents of New Orleans we’d apparently have already begun preparations for carnival season; Lent coincides with the Feast of Saint Valentine this year. As it is, I’ve never set foot in Lousiana, and winter has finally settled into our woodsy rim of the Kansas prairies; the lows are supposed to dip down below zero over the weekend. If I had to give January a color and flavor I’d say it was like one of those icy blue menthol-eucalyptus cough lozenges that elderly aunts used to always carry in their purses or cardigan pockets. When the sky is clear its blue is brilliant as summer, and oh how it can make your heart break. Then you breathe deeply and find that the cold is about to frost your lungs.
Between the cold temperatures and the early nightfalls, January isn’t my most favorite month of the year. Even so, I’m learning to be grateful for it and the unique opportunities it brings—a chance to refocus after another year (with its attendant good intentions) has run away. A chance for quiet after a season of mirth and merriment. A chance to look out over the next twelve months and make plans, then learn to hold them loosely.
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
G.K. Chesterton
I didn’t exactly make New Year resolutions. I did, however, do some things in preparation for the new year. I cleaned my room. I renewed my gym membership. I took the ceramic figure of a nun that had stood on my bookshelf for the past fourteen years and deliberately smashed it on the driveway, then threw the pieces in the garbage bin. I burned fourteen years’ worth of “letters to my future husband” in the bathtub. I filled out habit tracker charts with things like wash your face, take your vitamins, memorize scripture. I deleted Facebook and Instagram from my phone. And I decided to join a club and take ukulele or dancing (or some kind of) lessons.
Ten days into the month and my performance on the habit tracker sheets doesn’t look very impressive so far—partially because never do I ever want to wake up at 5 a.m. and do anything other than immediately go back to sleep, partially because I often forget to make my little x next to the particular tasks I’ve managed to accomplish. But as Chesterton says, “Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.” Starting afresh isn’t limited to January firsts, thank goodness; starting afresh starts the next morning, the next hour, the next moment after whatever happened that we want to start afresh from. And thank goodness as well that the ability to start afresh does not itself depend on us.
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
Lamentations 3:22-23, ESV
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“New year, new you!” is the marketing catchphrase prolifically employed in this season, as though we were all somehow magically born again at the stroke of midnight (wouldn’t that be wonderful!) and left our old selves in the shrouds of the year we’d just cast off. But we do always bring those selves with us, and we carry the same hopes, fears, flaws, strengths and insecurities across the border of the calendar.
I always overestimate what I’m willing to do or change. I frequently overpromise and underperform. But January, increasingly, feels like a liminal space of grace, where the world is once more stripped down to the fundamental shapes of things and I am reminded that life, as Eugene Peterson puts it, is “a long obedience in the same direction.”
“This life therefore is not righteousness but growth in righteousness; not health but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not what we shall be but we are growing toward it; the process is not yet finished but it is going on; this is not the end but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory but all is being purified.”
Martin Luther
And thank Goodness Himself for that.
